


i spent a year suspended in air

by autoeuphoric (FreezingRayne)



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: Consent Issues, M/M, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-27
Updated: 2018-01-27
Packaged: 2019-03-10 05:32:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13495906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FreezingRayne/pseuds/autoeuphoric
Summary: “Did I--did you fuck him? Did we fuck Tyrell Wellick?”“I did what I always do--exactly what needs to be done. You’re just too wrapped up in your own bullshit to realize it.”(Elliot wakes up in Tyrell's bed. Three guesses who put him there.)





	i spent a year suspended in air

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cerasi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cerasi/gifts).



> Just the general Mr. Robot consent warnings in that half the time Mr. Robot is making the calls, and Elliot isn't. Proceed with caution.

I wake up violent, consciousness flying into me like a bird from a cage. I don’t know where I am. For one extraordinary pulse of disorientation, I think I’m at Shayla’s. Waking up hungover and heavy somewhere I don’t belong is tied up inextricably with her apartment--incense and pot, laundry detergent, and a week’s worth of dirty dishes leaning over in the sink. Gauzy scarves covering scratched-up tables and draped over lamps to soften the light, a carved wooden headboard we’d found on the side of the road and dragged in, because Shayla thought it looked like an antique. It was Urban Outfitters junk, but I didn’t tell her that. 

Sometimes I’ll hold up my time with Shayla like some halcyon dream, even though it wasn’t. It was mostly anxiety. The perilous certainty that these very average actions I performed with her everyday--talking, smiling, fucking-- were fragile, corruptible. One flawed line of code, one wrong button pressed, and it would all fold. 

But I don’t have to tell you that, do I? You saw it. I don’t hide anything from you. I leaned on Shayla, and it killed her. 

I’m not at Shayla’s now. I don’t recognize anything at all. The walls are hospital white, and the desk and nightstand are pale, sanded wood. The desktop computer is built from scratch, but all of those parts are a couple years too old to really be good for anything. The curtains drift in the air conditioning, letting in a line of light that thickens and shrinks, thickens and shrinks across the bed. It’s morning. 

I lie flat on my back, waiting for the trap, the catch, the nightmare to come out of my peripheral vision. When nothing does, I wait for things to make sense instead. They don’t. 

I’ve spent months, possibly years, being used by my own subconscious. Elliot was just a vehicle for Mr. Robot, a meat suit to put on at night and hang up in the morning. An appliance to switch on and off. Not knowing where I am never means anything good. 

Across from the bed hangs a painting of a jagged coastline, brown earth and ice-blue water. It hits the uncanny impressionist valley between kitschy and foreboding, and I don’t get why anyone would hang it up in their room. Who wants to wake up every morning and feel like you might fall into a fjord? 

I move one arm, then the other, checking to see if I’m restrained. I’m not. I just have a crick in my neck and the typical case of dry mouth from drinking anything harder than beer. Two orange prescription bottles sit on the nightstand, beside an ugly stainless steel lamp and an alarm clock flashing all eights. I read the name on the labels just as the white noise of the shower drops off. I add it to the ascetic, Scandinavian decor and...No. How...what the fuck? 

You must have seen what happened. How did I get here? 

I’m naked. That’s an immediate concern. I grab for the dark sheet at the foot of the bed. Why do humans always rush to cover themselves first, before even reaching for a weapon? It’s pathetic. It’s maladaptive. I do it anyway. 

The bathroom door opens and Tyrell Wellick comes out of it. He’s flushed, hair slicked back from his eyes, moisture dotted on his chest and shoulders. My shock stalls, compounds. He’s naked too. Of course he is. He’d been showering. Because this is his house. 

There is something brutal about the naked human body, something grotesque and unbearable. It’s not a natural revulsion--we aren’t born that way. Everyone is trained into it, like we’re trained to distrust people who don’t look like us, or to react to ringtones or fire alarms and sirens. 

Tyrell towels off his hair, drying it to a feathery mess. “Good morning.” 

Acid shoots through my limbs, and I roll to my feet as soon as my muscles let me. It’s ridiculous how the mind can be such a powerful machine, but when it comes to it telling the body what to do, it’s an imbecile. I’m frozen, backed into a corner like an animal, but an animal making slippery vowel noises when Tyrell comes around the bed. He takes my face in his hands. 

“Elliot,” he says, in his softest voice, accent flattening out his consonants. He smiles, the same way he’d smiled the night he shot me--gentle, ecstatic. An expression you might interpret as kind, until you get close enough to see the mania. 

His hands anchor on my jaw and he kisses me with such conviction that for one vertiginous moment I kiss him back. I don’t know what’s going on and Tyrell clearly does, and in situations where everyone knows what’s happening and I don’t, the easiest and most reflexive response is to play along. 

But then Tyrell murmurs, “I’m glad you stayed this time,” and runs his hand down my back. 

I writhe out of his grip, backing up into the curtains and slamming my elbow against the window.

“I have to--um, it’s not--.” 

“Elliot--.” 

I eel away and throw myself into the bathroom. The mirror is fogged from Tyrell’s shower, and every breath pulls in soap and woody shampoo. I put my hands on the the edges of the sink and will down the reflexive walls of panic closing in on me. 

Tyrell starts knocking right away. 

“I’ll be out in a minute!” I bellow. 

Tyrell says something about hangovers and coffee, but blood is rushing in my ears, rendering all audio input full of holes. I focus on my breathing, long for morphine, and snarl my fingers in my hair. “What the fuck did you do?” 

Mr. Robot props a hip on the sink, crossing his arms and looking at me through fogged glasses. “Calm down. You’re panicking.” 

“Fuck yes, I’m panicking!” 

Mr. Robot surveys me like we’re in a psych ward, and I’m a raving unfortunate who needs to be indulged but ultimately ignored. And why the hell is he dressed while I’m ass fucking naked? “What did you--.” My shoulders roll at the memory of Tyrell’s touch, the familiarity, the marks on his neck, the perfect imprint of teeth that can really only add up to one thing. “Did I--did you fuck him?” I yank at my own hair. “Did we fuck Tyrell Wellick?” 

“I did what I always do--exactly what needs to be done. You’re just too wrapped up in your own bullshit to realize it.” 

The steam is fading from the mirror and the deep, dark craters under my eyes are the worst they’ve ever been. I’m not sure what makes me feel sicker, the fact that I spent the night in that lunatic’s bed, or that I’m talking to my dad about it. 

Why does my subconscious continue to manifest this side of myself as my dead father? I have no idea. Or, I do, but it’s all pop-psych garbage and not worth thinking about. 

“It’s strategic,” Mr. Robot tells me. 

“Strategic? How the hell--.” 

“It was the fastest way to earn his trust back. Right now he’s our only tie to EvilCorp. If he thinks we’re on his side, he’ll go to us before he goes to the Dark Army.” 

“So you decided to earn that trust back with my ass?” I’m right in his face now, shouting. What does this looks like from the outside? What does it look like to you? Am I bellowing at thin air, or does this all happen inside my head, without me actually saying anything at all? 

“Are you having a gay panic, of all things? Really?” I don’t like Mr. Robot’s smugness at the best of times, and I definitely don’t need it now. “You?” 

“It’s not a gay panic! It’s not that he’s a guy, he’s a fucking maniac!” 

“Right, right. And Elliot Alderson only knocks boots with totally average and well-adjusted people.” Mr. Robot’s grin is nasty. “I made an executive decision.” 

-

I spend enough time screaming at myself in the bathroom that when I finally manage to extricate my clothes from the morass on the carpet, Tyrell has already left. For work, I guess. It’s a weekday. I’m pretty sure. 

He left me a note on the counter beside a half-full pot of coffee. The easy intimacy scratches at my throat; my breaths taste like metal. I crumple the post-it note up. How often does Mr. Robot stay over? The bastard has gone quiet and refuses to answer. 

I leave the coffee in the pot and instead buy a cup from the bodega on the corner. I take a couple sips before pouring it down a storm drain. I’m too queasy for caffeine. I ride home with my hands buried in my pockets, eyes down, longing for a time when all I had to worry about was loneliness and the frenetic shake of anxiety. At least back then I wasn’t ruining anyone’s life but my own. 

-

Tyrell calls me. All day. Not constantly, just enough that I know it must line up to breaks in between meetings, a lunch hour, his evening commute. I put my phone on silent, but then I can still see the light and feel the vibrations through the desk. Even if I turn it off or throw it in the microwave and melt it down I would still know that somewhere out there, Tyrell Wellick is thinking about me, searching for me. For _him._

It’s disquieting. 

I try to sleep, but there’s only so long I can go on staring at the warped, sagging ceiling. This is such a depressing goddamn place but I can’t imagine leaving. When I finally do begin to doze off, hanging in that uncertain place between waking and dreaming, I start to think I’m somewhere else--cooler and brighter, and I’m sure that when I open my eyes it will be to a pure white ceiling and an enormous painting of a haunted ice field. The phantom touch of warm fingers and a voice saying my name. Comfortable things. Things I barely recognize. They make me perspire in shivery fear. 

I kick off the sheets and root through the kitchen, which I haven’t stocked in weeks and haven’t cleaned in months. I knock aside coffee mugs and a stack of disposable wooden chopsticks to get at the bottle of tequila I’d shoved back there to hide from Darlene when she was here. 

I find a shot glass crusted with something red that smells kind of like Chambord, give up halfway through washing it and just take a swig from the bottle. I don’t have anyone to impress. Not even Mr. Robot is here. 

Alcohol isn’t my controlled substance of choice, but my morphine pipeline dried up and I’m not going to smoke with Flipper in the apartment, so drunk it fucking is. Not ideal. Alcohol cuts the strings in my brain, greases the wheels. Alcohol is for thought experiments and morbid fascination. 

I’d thought Tyrell was just delusional--the familiarity, talking to me like we’re close, much closer than just co-conspirators. But maybe he isn’t. Maybe, once again--thanks to Mr. Robot--I’m the idiot. 

I’ve kissed guys before. At clubs and on dares. One of Darlene’s boyfriends gave me a handjob when we were 16, and I’m still not totally clear on why. I’m not sure if Darlene knows. She probably wouldn’t care. She’d laugh. So it’s not without precedent, the Tyrell thing. Well. Not the guy part. 

I take another swig of tequila and sink down on to the couch. It smells like leather and popcorn. 

I don’t want to think about Tyrell, but then again, I do. Because I know how my brain works and I wouldn’t have started drinking if I didn’t want to go down this road. The warm, melting look in Tyrell’s eyes when he touched my face. It had been stomach-churning, but also compelling. No one has ever looked at me like that, not even Shayla. Like I'm a revelation. 

Tyrell is unstable and dangerous, but so am I.

I wipe a hand across my mouth, liquor painting the back of my fingers. The room is going fuzzy around the edges, my thoughts softening and blurring into each other.  
Executive decision, Mr. Robot had said. An executive decision to fuck a psychopath. Maybe we deserve each other. Maybe after all the decisions I’ve made, that Mr. Robot and F Society have made, it was always going to be Tyrell. 

What do you think? You’ve been with me long enough, I’m sure you’ve got opinions.

So much of my life, my decisions, the shitshow of the last few years, it’s all because of him. Mr. Robot. He knows so many things I don’t. There are people across the city other than Tyrell, across the world, who only know that half of me. I have all these lives and connections floating around out there, and I don’t know them. My life is a book missing every other page, one half of a phone conversation--

“If you want to know what Tyrell is like in bed,” Mr. Robot says. “Just ask.” 

To my tipsy brain, his voice comes from everywhere. Vibrating up from the pit of my stomach and curling off the walls. I imagine him coming out of my mouth and nostrils, thickening like smoke into the ragged, lined face of my father from twenty years ago. I’m not actually sure if he’s really here. Or, not really here, but...you know what I mean. It’s always just me, sitting here shouting at myself. 

“He likes to beg,” Mr. Robot says. “He likes your hands around his neck.” 

“Fuck off.” The room tilts when I stand up, but I manage to pour myself into a pair of jeans and find two matching shoes. I can’t find my hoodie but it isn’t cold. 

 

-

“Elliot.” Tyrell blinks at me from across the threshold. “Are you alright? Why do you keep ignoring my calls?” 

I rub a knuckle against my temple. I’d sobered up on the train ride over, and at this point I’m not even sure what I’m here to do, but when Tyrell opens the door up wider, I walk inside. 

I’d barely gotten a glance at the place this morning; only jagged, panicky impressions. Clean, large. Cavernously empty for someone with Tyrell’s salary. Does he just not give a shit about furniture? 

“It’s a nice place,” I say, because I don’t know what else to do. 

“You say that like you’ve never been here before.” It’s probing, cautious. A question. 

So he does know. He guessed, or someone told him. Who? Angela? That Dark Army fuck in the glasses? Or Mr. Robot himself? 

“I haven’t.” I’m not wearing anything I can push my hands into so I just ball my fists up at my sides, nails cutting into my palms. 

Tyrell tips his head to one side, then the other. He’s as dressed down as I’ve ever seen him--well, apart from this morning, when I’d gotten full-frontal. I didn’t know he owned sweatpants, or that his hair was capable of existing in any state besides permanently plastered back off his forehead. It makes him looks...softer, vulnerable. It reminds me that as much damage as Tyrell has done, he’s just a man. And not a very large man. I could probably take him. I could kill him, if I needed to.

“I haven’t been here,” I say again. “Not really.” 

The edges of Tyrell’s mouth tense. “You aren’t my Elliot.” 

Alarm ripples into my gut and takes control of my spinal cord. I’m not scared of Tyrell. He shot me, sent men in black to pull me into vans, but the module in my brain that allows for fear has been supersaturated. Back when I was a teenager I would contend with my anxiety by pretending I was someone else. 

Maybe I finally got my wish and managed to become someone else entirely. 

“If you aren’t Elliot,” Tyrell says. “Then what should I call you?” 

An unexpected swell of rage slaps into me. “I am Elliot! That fucker--he isn’t me.” But that’s not true. “He’s the bad parts of me,” I amend. But that isn’t true either. I still have plenty of bad qualities that haven’t been shoved onto Mr. Robot. 

Tyrell smiles. Not the psychotic smile, the smug one. “He told me you might say something like that.” 

My chest ices over. I might as well be breathing out steam. “What? Today?” I don’t remember losing time, but I’d lost it for months before I even began to suspect. 

“No, no. You don’t understand.” Tyrell is flushed from his cheeks down to his collarbones. It’s obvious he’s been drinking. “He told me--you told me that you might try to lie to me sometimes. Say that what we have isn’t real.” 

“It isn’t!” I shout. “Nothing he says is real, he--.” From the corner of my eye I see a flicker of movement. A movie effect, Tyler Durden flashing to life in the first few scenes of Fight Club. I blink, trying to clear Mr. Robot out like grit in my eyes. “He’s just doing this to fuck with you. With both of us.” 

Tyrell breathes like he’s running, like he’s the one who’s been shouting. “He told me he loves me.” 

I swallow against my dry throat. “He doesn’t. You can’t trust anything he says.” 

“Is that right?” Tyrell’s smile inverts, goes ugly. His accent thickens into the cracked ice of Swedish vowels. “Do you ever wonder if _you_ are the one who can’t be trusted? Yo aren't the one who has worked with me for the last year, who has changed the world with me.” He jabs a finger at the door, toward the world. “Do you ever wonder if you are the imposter? The handicap he has to wear for half his life?” 

I make a hard, ragged noise through my teeth, because of course I have. Part of your alter-ego being a super villain is wondering if you are the superfluous personality, that you’re the one who emerged out of psychosis instead of the other way around. It contradicts my memories, but that’s never stopped me before. I forgot Darlene was my sister, and I didn’t recognize my dead father when he started talking to me. Who knows how much reality doesn’t match up with the inside of my head? 

Tyrell is getting smugger by the second. Like he guesses my internal monologue. Just how well does he know me? Mr. Robot said they were fucking, but do they _hang out_? Go to the movies? I hate Swedish films. They’re unbelievably slow. 

All data points to Mr. Robot telling him to fuck with both of us--me and Tyrell. But what if that wasn’t it? What if he actually cares about him? 

I don’t know why I came here. 

“Sure you do,” Mr. Robot says. 

He’s there suddenly. No Tyler Durden flicker. He reaches for Tyrell and I, senselessly, wait for his fingers to go through him. They don’t. And then I’m watching Tyrell Wellick make out with my dad, while Tyrell strokes the side of his face and murmurs, “It’s you.” 

That’s one reason I do it. I don’t want to watch this. But I also don’t want to be the isolated ghost, trapped in the distant corner of my own head, watching my body do things without my input. Every inch of Mr. Robot drips smugness; he’s so sure I’m just going to stand here like an idiot and watch him take control of my life again. Because I’m anxious, because I don’t like to be touched. 

Fuck that. Fuck him. I’m done with him owning my life. 

I put both hands against Mr. Robot and shove. I don’t know what it looks like from the outside--me, jerking in Tyrell’s grip, breaking away to flail at the monster in my brain. But what _I_ see is Mr. Robot toppling toward the wall, hitting hard and sliding down out of view. I hear the hollow thud, so something must hit the drywall.  
But Tyrell doesn’t look at the wall. He grabs me, on the shoulder and the neck, palm cupping the ball of my throat. His pupils are enormous, cavernous grey. He smells like liquor and the desperation of animal fear. 

Shayla and I didn’t kiss much. Or spend a lot of time cuddling. Generally, we were fucking or we weren’t touching. It worked for us, generally. Her radiator malfunctioned constantly, so it was always unbearably hot in the apartment. 

Tyrell puts his hands all over me, my chest, my neck, the shaved sides of my head. He presses a thumb against the corner of my mouth. I’m not sure what he wants me to do with it, but I curl my tongue around it and his pupils blow wide. He presses me back hard against the counter and my arm slides across the granite, sending the vodka bottle flying. There is no satisfying smash. It just bounces twice on a thick grey rug. 

“This is different,” Tyrell says, wonderingly. 

Nobody’s going to write a pop song about this. It’d make shitty pornography. A lot of elbows and swearing and teeth knocking together. I get flashes of sense memory--his hand on the back of my neck, his breath against my ear. I realize I’ve smelled his cologne before more than once, on my clothes, on me, coming out of a fugue in the shower at 4am, wondering whether I’d lost time, no longer caring enough to check. Did he ever leave marks, was I ever sore? Would I even notice if I had been? I didn’t notice myself plotting to overthrow capitalism. 

He brings me up to his room and I sit on the edge of the bed. I watch him take off his clothes and try not to fall into the painting of the fjord. Coastline? Bay? I’m not clear on what a fjord actually is. 

“Why do you have that painting?” I ask as he takes off his socks. 

“Hmm? Oh, the Gillies? It was my wife’s. She said it made her feel out of control.” 

He looks at the painting and I look at him. A lot of people are pale--Darlene, by some freak of genetics, is much paler than me and gets hassled a lot less at airport gates--but Tyrell almost glows. How long did they keep him in that basement? The shadows between his ribs and beneath his collar bones look like bruising. His complexion makes the bite on his shoulder stand out ugly and red. 

I don’t see many naked men. I don’t go to the gym and I haven’t watched porn in years, and I’m not great at telling whether people are good looking or not. It sounds pretentious, but it’s true. And I don’t mean I see their ‘inner beauty’, or whatever. Attraction is unbelievably subjective, twisted up in hang-ups and kinks and the messaging from a makeup ad you saw when you were twelve. It’s impossible to draw any sort of accurate conclusions. The girls in school used to call Angela ugly, skeletal and bug-eyed. I always thought she was beautiful. 

Tyrell leaves the lights off. When he starts to undress me, I let him. He presses two fingertips against a quarter-sized crag of scar tissue. “I thought you wanted to die,” he says quietly. 

I feel nothing there. The nerves are fried. “I thought you were fake.” 

Tyrell’s laugh gets caught somewhere between his throat and his nose. He takes my fingers and arranges them around his neck. When I immediately jerk away he says, “You really don’t remember.” 

“I’m not him,” I say, on to infinity, but I let him put my hands back around his neck. 

I can tell what he wants, but this is so strange, so tilted, that I don’t think I’m going to be able to get hard enough to give it to him. But then he uses his mouth, sloppy and enthusiastic, and I’m proven wrong. 

We fuck face to face, which is a little uncomfortable for both of us. We’re trying to prove a point. Not to each other--to _him_. As usual, everything I do eventually comes back to Mr. Robot. 

And as usual, I like it. 

I like everything. The way Tyrell chokes when I squeeze down on his throat, how fragile his waist feels in my hands. How his already breakable expression cracks and shatters when I fuck up into him. He knows what he’s doing and I emphatically don’t, but he still falls to breathless, trembling pieces in front of me. I wonder how much of it is an act. I worry that none of it is. 

This is what he’s like with Mr. Robot. This is what Mr. Robot _wants_. What I want. 

Afterward Tyrell lies still with his eyes closed, but I can tell by his breathing that he isn’t asleep. I don’t bother to pretend. I stare up at the ceiling. It’s cleaner than mine but still shitty to insomnia-stare at. My head hurts a little from the tequila and my scalp tingles. I don’t have much hair, but Tyrell sure likes yanking what I have. Shayla used to tell me I should grow it out, but the feeling of it on my neck is too irritating. 

I don’t think the secret to assimilation with Mr. Robot is capitulation. It’s not giving in and letting him have anything he wants. But I don’t think it’s about fighting him either. I’ve already seen how well that works; it doesn’t. I think the answer--whatever the fuck that means--is some grating synthesis of the two. 

“It’s about damn time.” 

I look up. So does Tyrell. Mr. Robot stands at the foot of the bed with jacket, glasses, and smugness fully intact. I can’t tell if Tyrell is looking at him or at me. I reach out and touch Tyrell’s knee, just to convince myself of where my body is. 

“Okay, boys.” Mr. Robot leans into his dad persona, because he’s a fucking creep. “EvilCorp. What’s the plan?” 

\--

_"I spent a year suspended in air_  
My mind on the gap, my head on the stairs  
From healers to dealers and then back again  
From guru to voodoo, from voodoo to zen" 

"Pills, Pills, Pills," -St. Vincent

**Author's Note:**

> And then they team up, or something. 
> 
> This fic stubbornly REFUSED to work until I realized it needed to be in 1st person POV. I just couldn't get Elliot's voiceover out of my head, so I leaned into it.


End file.
